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To say that there are two million people reading Mrs. Eddy, also proves nothing, since numbers are no vindication. Over a hundred million people have kissed the big toe of Saint Peter in Rome.

And surely the Roman Catholic Church contains a vast number of highly educated people. The things you do not know, you do not know. And Mrs. Eddy, knowing nothing of literary style, knew nothing of literary art. Her prose and her poetry are worse than ordinary. All inspirational poetry I ever read is rot, and all inspired paintings I ever saw are daubs. Mrs. Eddy should not be blamed for her limitations.

Many people who are great in certain lines labor under the hallucination that they are also great in others. Matthew Arnold was a great writer, and he also thought he was a great orator.

But when he spoke, his words simply fell over the footlights into the orchestra and died there. He could not reach the front row. Most comedians want to play Hamlet, and all of us have heard girls attempt to sing who thought they could sing, and who were encouraged in the hallucination by their immediate kinsfolk.

Mrs. Eddy thought she could write, and unfortunately she was corroborated in her error by the applause of people who, not being able to read her book, kindly attributed the inability to their own limitations and not to hers, being prompted in this by the suggestion oft repeated by Mrs. Eddy, herself. The resemblance of Mrs. Eddy’s thought to that of Jesus was never noticed until Mrs. Eddy first explained the matter. Mrs. Eddy was by no means insane. Swedenborg was a civil engineer and a mathematician. He wrote forty books that are nearly as opaque as “Science and Health.” If you write stupidly enough, some one will surely throw up his cap and cry “Great!” And others will follow the example and take up the shout, because it is much easier, as Doctor Johnson affirmed, to praise a book than to read and understand it. The custom of reading to a congregation in a dead or foreign language, which the listeners do not understand, has never caused any general protest from the listeners. The scoffers are the only ones who have ever noticed the incongruity, and they do not count, since they probably would not attend, anyway.

Next to reading from a book written in the dead language, is to read from a book that is unintelligible. To listen to such makes no tax upon the intellect, and with the right accessories is soporific, restful, pleasing and to be commended. If it does not supply an idea, it at least imparts a feeling. Mrs. Eddy’s success in literature arose from the extreme muddiness of her thinking and her opacity in expression.

If she had written fairly well, her mediocrity would have been apparent to every one; but writing absolutely without rhyme or reason, we bow before her supreme assurance. The strongest element in men is inertia–we agree rather than fight about it. We want health–and health is what Mrs. Eddy gives to us–therefore, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” is the greatest book in the whole world. Sancta simplicitas! Why not, indeed!

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People turn to Mrs. Eddy’s book for relief just exactly as they formerly went to the doctor for the same reason.

In addition to bodily health, Mrs. Eddy gives joy, hope, worldly success; and even superior minds, seeing these practical results of Christian Science, move in the line of least resistance and are quite willing to accept the book, not troubled at all about its medieval reasoning. In Ungania is a very great merchant who, not content with having the biggest store in the Kingdom, aspires to the biggest University. The fact that the higher criticism is to him only a trivial matter, and really unworthy of the serious attention of a busy man, simply reveals human limitation.